


These Strangers, in a Foreign World

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, F/M, Gen, Medicine, Painting, Romance, Slow Burn, mail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 09:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6561886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What arrives and how it is received-- seven ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Strangers, in a Foreign World

In the interim, it was decided, Matron Brannan would take over many of Bullen’s tasks as quartermaster. It was unconventional to have a woman in the role, even temporarily, but the three doctors agreed, a moment much rarer than a blue moon, that none of them could be spared to find a replacement just now. Matron Brannan was held to be reliable in every way. Why, Dr. Foster said, you could tell the time by her grumbles—just now it must be time for tea or perhaps that was the harrumph for an overdue amputation. She would be in charge of the servants, the provisioning, the dispersal of packages and letters—everything but the accounting. None could imagine her wits quick enough to track the greenbacks’ flow, underestimating her again, she sighed to herself; men were so short-sighted but she would run the place well nonetheless. She did not care for Bullen’s way for holding packages hostage to time and coin but she hadn’t the resources to form a system of dispersal. Packages came to their recipients quickly at times, several stacked together, of after lengthy pauses, sometimes smelling of the strong cheese they had nestled near, half-forgotten. The soldiers received letters from wives and mothers, the less frequent devoted sister, and boxes full of crumbling foodstuff, pots of jam oozing darkly from cracks along the way. The staff received more particular items…

Mary

Mary knew that there had been trials during her marriage. There must have been days when Gustav exasperated her or was late to a meal when his experiment went awry. She vaguely recalled his shirtsleeves and cuffs needed more mending than expected as he forgot to roll them back before he mixed and stirred reagents but was convinced his agility prevented the need for sleeve protectors. She knew these things in her mind but no longer felt them with her heart. The yearning for her husband remained but the richness and dimension of their affection was diminished. The intensity of their brief marriage receded like the tide.

She was very glad, then, that Gustav’s favorite sister Anna continued to write to her. She had only visited them once at the beginning of Gustav’s illness, when they thought he was only troubled by a bad night or the growing insults of middle age. Mary had liked Anna right away. She was a plump, dark woman, younger than Gustav by several years, more Mary’s compatriot. She had nothing of the Germanic milkmaid about her. Mary heartily enjoyed listening to Gustav and his sister converse about German politics and art; there was a pleasure in finding her way into the rhythm of their language, a new dance to be mastered. She appreciated that Anna was patient with her own painstakingly slow German though she had complained to Gustav, ‘Your sister must think me a fool, I am so unable to convey my thoughts to her fluently!’ He had patted her softly and turned to take her in his arms; at night, he always chose to soothe her temper with an embrace.

Anna had started writing during Gustav’s illness. It was a relief to have someone to confide in who was so far she could only offer a few words, not the outpouring of advice Mary had received from her own sister, her pastor’s wife, even the neighbors in their constitutionals. Anna only wrote of prayers and thanks and memories of Gustav’s boyhood she thought might make him smile to remember. The letters had not ceased with his death, though the black border had appeared—a constant reminder that the golden link between them had broken. They had followed her even to Mansion House and served as the anchor to another life.

Anna was kind, so kind. She wrote in a schoolgirl’s English to Mary, unaware of how much progress Mary had made in writing and reading German, her university Gustav’s sickbed. To refuse the English seemed a discourtesy insurmountable, so Mary wrote her own letters in simple terms and used the rounded hand of her 15th year. Anna was kind and sent not only charming letters but sometimes carefully wrapped boxes of marzipan. Mary remembered her astonishment and delight when Anna had unwrapped a box she’d brought with her; it was filled with every fruit and flower, rendered delicately in pink and green and yellow, the almond paste curled here, furled there. Mary had never seen such sweetmeats before. She knew lemon drops and horehound, the snowy white of a peppermint stick. Marzipan was a luxury to the eye even before the tongue. They had savored the box that visit, one piece a day, and Anna had sent more to tempt Gustav before he was beyond temptation.

Anna had sent another box. Mary knew she should be grateful for the expensive, beautiful gift. She knew Anna was telling her how loved she was, even so far away. Yet she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. What she truly wished for were books of Schiller and Goethe, like ones she had shared with Gustav and then continued alone, when he was too sick to read, to be read aloud to, when he was gone and she had only the stately German cadences to console her. This charnel house was the inverse to the mausoleum her home had become after Gustav’s death but she felt the lure of the poems just as acutely. Anna could not know she was capable of reading the German poetry by herself and she could not find a way to share the knowledge without bringing them both back to the pain of loss. The whimsical marzipan was from another time, for another Mary, one who had passed with Gustav’s death. She would share it with the boys and hope the violets and pansies would remind them of their mother’s gardens. For the soldiers, the sweets might assuage their heimweh but for her, they only evoked sehnsucht.

Byron

Byron Hale could tell from the handwriting that the package, wrapped neatly in thick brown paper, was from his niece Sarah. She was fourteen years old and had left her schooldays behind, departing with a bare minimum of geography, spelling, and arithmetic and a bulbous cursive that sprawled and lurched across envelopes and stationery alike. She was his oldest sister’s second child and had been a comparative beauty at her birth. She had settled into an entirely unobjectionable girl, placid and dutiful. She was sweet as molasses and dull as dirt, but she was reliable and kind and Byron Hale knew these traits to be in short supply in the wide world. 

Byron had three sisters—Charlotte, Ada and Evangeline. No one had ever called them the three Graces. They were sturdy women, so similar you’d think you had double vision, would like to shake your head to keep them straight. Byron was the second oldest, like Sarah, but they were all so close in age, he posed no threat to his sisters’ triumvirate. It had been a comfortable way to grow up, he supposed. They didn’t make much of him, but he was the one who received the lion’s share by default of his gender. It had been an adjustment to join the Army but he was used to plodding along and getting good returns on little investment. He did his best by the patients, but he didn’t suffer overmuch when his men did. He wished for adulation but he had not been raised to attain it. His sisters all lived on nearby farms in Ohio and each had a sizable family and a husband to care for. They had so much to do that caring for Byron had fallen out of fashion. He was touched that Sarah had taken up his cause.

Enclosed was a brief, largely vapid note, though he felt she was sincere when she signed it, ‘Your loving niece, Sarah Ward.’ There was a housewife, folded and filled with three sharpened needles and twists of thread, a few shell buttons; this was much appreciated as the Army had not though to provide much in the way of upkeep. Fortunately for him, Byron was as acceptable sewing cloth as men’s bodies. Goodness knows, Anne had never offered to help with the least bit of housekeeping and Byron was loath to pay a freewoman for his mending. Sarah had also sent him a dozen handkerchiefs, all with his monogram in the corner, BTH; there were no flourishes to the embroidery but the letters were clear. The fabric looked a bit worn; it was hard to get quality material with the war raging, and he suspected these might be repurposed from a petticoat. Sarah only had younger brothers, so she needn’t hand her petticoats down. He tucked the housewife in the top shelf of his traveling chest, where he would have it to hand. The handkerchiefs he bundled together and shoved haphazardly in a drawer. He wouldn’t get much use from them. He didn’t cry.

Henry

It seemed like a long time ago now, but Henry Hopkins had once been a boy who played in the snow. Of course, he lived in upstate New York, just beneath Lake Ontario, where the winter storms liked to pick up the lake water and bring it back down as miles of consecrated whiteness from October to April. You didn’t have much childhood unless you accepted the drifts would be deep and Albert Cooper would always pelt you, right at the back of the neck where your scarf fell away, with snowballs polished to a glossy sheen. In an unlucky year, they’d get an ice storm. It was distractingly beautiful but deadly; it made knives of everything. The apples were usually sweeter those years, so at least there was compensation, complete with cinnamon.

Henry saw the latest package had arrived from his mother. She still lived in Medina with his one sister who hadn’t married. Constance had been aptly named, more presciently than their scapegrace sister Angelica, and seemed happy to be the spinster daughter her mother had hoped for. The two of them spent their time keeping the neatest house imaginable and doing good works with their church. The canal that had led to the incorporation of the town had brought prosperity but with it vice and the Hopkins women were determined to root out iniquity on their very doorstep. Henry knew it had been the greatest moment of his mother’s life when he had announced his vocation. He’d make sure, come what may, she had that to hang on to.

The package was bulky and he sighed, resigned. There was no way to stop them. As he expected, there was a small note inside, with crabbed handwriting, letting him know that he was loved and missed by his ‘fond mother and devoted sister.’ They rarely shared news of the town or its people, information he would have found a comfort. Instead, he unwound the folded sweater in blue wool they had sent. He saw Constance had finished the neck and cuffs with a fancy stitch. It was the fourth sweater they had sent and he was unable to make them understand the warm climate he inhabited now, the utter uselessness of even the first one they’d sent. He knew each one was worked on with care and that it brought them joy in the making. He’d given up. He would bring this one to the nuns as he had brought the others, so they could unravel it. They would then knit socks for the soldiers. He liked to see the nuns in their habits, sitting two by two in the blue evenings, clicking the rosary with their needles on yarn his mother and sister had first knitted to Protestant hymns. It was a double benediction to men who had an infinite need of grace.

Anne

Anne had three dresses in her wardrobe and she loathed all three of them. It was dangerous to feel too much enmity towards the truly important things in life, she had discovered through no shortfall of grief. She did what she could for the injured and sick men lining the wards, but she no longer suffered when they died, easy or hard. She found keeping a mocking eye on Mary Phinney leached the bitterness of her effective demotion and she accepted that Byron Hale was the best companion she’d find in this charnel house, as bluff and foolish as he was. She saved her wrath for poorly made tea and bandages, thunderstorms that turned the byways to a river of sticky mud, the looks the Mother Superior gave her, as if Boulogne was really that much closer to the heavenly gates. And for those three dresses, drab as the robin’s mate, sleeves out of fashion, hems perpetually stained. Once, Anne Hastings had been a girl, perhaps not the prettiest girl, but with a fresh face and cheeks pink as crabapple blossom; she’d had a white muslin dress with a blue sash and she’d thought the world was ready to unfold its delights before her, one after another like Phinney’s bon-bons. She’d learned her lesson about life’s myriad disappointments and had kept learning it until she knew enough to vent her copious spleen on the wardrobe’s contents.

She hadn’t expected very much when she received the parcel from Mrs. Ezekiel [Helen] Patterson of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. She’d nursed both the Patterson boys and the second one, possibly the younger, had survived. She’d sent a letter about the first one, a consoling letter that omitted his final hemorrhage and abrupt descent into death, but let his mother know he’d asked to be remembered to her. Well, truly, he’d called for her with the wail of a newborn, but Anne knew how to write a letter. She’d received a few letters since then from Mrs. Ezekiel [Helen] Patterson, the first formally grateful and the subsequent ones less so, by and by. She didn’t expect them with any frequency, but it was pleasant to get news of a world far from Mansion House and to still be, even now, Mrs. Ezekiel [Helen] Patterson’s personal heroine of the War, despite the loss of the first boy. Since the advent of Mary Phinney, Anne knew she had become no one’s personal heroine at Mansion House, save for boys too delirious to see much beyond a pale round face and clean hands.

This parcel was somewhat larger than the usual overstuffed letter. Anne glanced at the letter briefly, taking in the salutation “My dear Miss Hastings” and the opening salvo of polite questions Mrs. Patterson did not want answers to. The third piece of paper had nothing written on it but was folded around something. Anne carefully shook it out and found a tatted lace fichu, large enough to cover both shoulders and be joined with her best brooch at the base of her throat. It was made of white silk thread and it was the loveliest thing Anne had seen since the War started. It was the loveliest thing that had been given to her in her whole life. She wept. Mrs. Ezekiel [Helen] Patterson had told her something she hadn’t heard in years, certainly never from Byron Hale or any other man who’d deigned to give her the time of day. She was lovable.

She laid the lappet in the drawer of her bedside table and turned to the wardrobe to consider which of the now slightly less loathsome dresses she’d permit the fichu to grace for Sunday’s church service. Her cheeks were flushed crabapple pink.

 

Emma

Miss Emma Green did not receive mail. Who was there to send it to her? Her parents and Jimmy and Alice lived with her, not that anyone but her mother would have made even a fair correspondent. She’d lived in the same town her whole life and so had her family, for so many years it bored her to consider it, like the begats in Leviticus. Her mother had an Aunt Alma who’d moved to Delaware, but she had no cause to write Emma, and any letter she sent certainly wouldn’t have a postmark from Texas. Emma turned the letter over in her hands and considered. There were too few enticing yet safe mysteries left; everything was either fraught with import or so dull she wished her governess back. The solution came to her more quickly than she would have liked—it must be from Perdita.

Perdita Hammond had been a close friend, possibly the closest Emma had ever had before the War started. It was a different world now, shaken into a new pattern every day with the brilliance of a kaleidoscope. Now, she might be friends of a sort with a boy from Kentucky or Tennessee. She would consider a Yankee chaplain a companion and a baroness a guide. Perdita was from the time before, when Emma cared most about cotillions and wheedling. Emma stroked the envelope, imaging Perdita’s fingers folding and sealing it. She and her family had been one of the first to leave for Texas, mortally offended by the Loyalty Oath and well-off enough to rebuild a comparable home so far away.

Emma remembered how she and Perdita had wept at the departure. She saw the tears for what they were now, the palest shade of grief, eagerly indulged. She and Perdita had both found an equal measure of enjoyment in the parting, the sense that life was finally including them in its narrative as main characters. She reflected on her earlier self, so sure she had finally entered the world of adults, the pangs of separation; she had not been truly exiled from childhood until she crossed the threshold of Mansion House. She wondered if Perdita had joined her, so far away now, in the incontrovertible bonds of womanhood, a place where bodies broke and could not be repaired, where souls broke and were lost, where sometimes she feared she would break, but for Nurse Mary’s encouraging nod, the chaplain’s eyes searching the room for her, Dr. Foster’s reassuring demands for her assistance.

Emma opened the letter but as she did, a smaller paper package slipped out. Her curiosity pricked again, she set the letter down, less interested in Perdita’s life in Texas than by what she had enclosed. Emma had always loved a present. With careful fingers, she creased the paper back and saw a dried flower, well, a small cluster, blue petals nearly indigo. She tried to imagine them in a garden or vase but couldn’t envision them vigorous, leaves and petals velvet with life. She didn’t recognize them. She and Perdita had enjoyed drying flowers, making artful displays or glazing them into scrapbooks. She saw her friend reaching out to her, tugging on the past between them for connection as they had once yoked themselves with colorful sashes, playing in the garden. She put the flowers back in their wrapping and the entire letter in the pocket of her pinafore. She would save it to read tonight, before she went to bed, an antidote against the day’s misery; she would keep the formulation of her response, the smoothing of the paper, the trail of the black ink, as a respite. And she would be able to look forward to the next time Perdita wrote, her letters drawing them close one again—reunion, though her friend was as far away as the moon.

Samuel

It was a relief when the parcel arrived. Samuel had nearly given up hoping for it. He understood his request would be a mystery to his Aunt Rachael and that she would rather have sent him a spare linen shirt, a cake of soap, even doses of quinine solicited from Dr. Berenson. There were other things he longed for from home even as his longing caused him shame in the face of the suffering he encountered within and without Mansion House. He knew the risk of asking for anything he treasured to be sent to Virginia; he existed in a tenuous space as a freedman among contraband, where every protection was personal. Should Dr. Foster, willingly or otherwise, remove his beneficence, Samuel was vulnerable; Nurse Mary could implore and demand all she wanted and it would count for nothing. Anything Samuel considered property could be rendered another’s simply based on a whim. He would not have one book of his small collection or one memento from his family at large with him in Alexandria.

What had been sent was a large book, its pages empty, pen and ink, secured with twine, and a dozen candles. Samuel knew he had more medical training than most and a greater gift for surgery than any doctor at Mansion House save Dr. Foster but he appreciated that the crucible of the War was creating both unexpected injuries and ingenious solutions. Even Dr. Hale, whose greatest skill was the speed with which he could remove a stinking leg, occasionally made a leap of surgical ingenuity he could not account for and would hardly repeat. Samuel meant to make sure any revision or invention could be repeated by creating his own textbook. He knew his anatomical drawings would be limited in detail and delicacy, but he planned for his words make up the difference. He’d thought for some time before he decided how to proceed; he was unwilling to spend himself in the creation of the book for it to be stolen or commandeered by another. To that end, he resolved to write in a cipher of his own creation. It would appear a worthless set of scribbles with crude drawings of arms, legs, faces with cheeks flashed back to show the mandible—a useless volume, protected by its own purported ignominy. It was the best plan he could devise.

The candles he intended to use to light the nights for writing. He had asked for a dozen but actually receiving the sheaf of slim tapers felt like a burden of plenty. He could count the hours each candle promised and knew both that while he could use every minute, it was more than he needed. As always, when not occupied by medicine first, his mind turned to Aurelia. There was so little he had to give that she would willingly accept but a half dozen candles—those she might agree to take, not able to apprehend any specific debt from the gift. She had begun to grasp that he offered something beyond a man’s love for a woman; he wanted to give her at least the taste of liberty, the recognition of her sovereign humanity. She did not distrust this philosophically, he felt, but rather had no context for it, as if she were Eve watching the first eagle soar. 

He would settle to the writing tonight. The book was large enough he could spare a page to write his grateful receipt of it to Aunt Rachael. He would offer the candles tomorrow, after the first wash was soaking, great cephalopods of linen marauding in the vats, and he would be prepared to find a second time and a third, when Aurelia refused initially, before she acquiesced. Her eyes would hold skepticism and appreciation and, if he were very lucky, a trace of amusement, light in the darkness.

Jed

Jed laughed aloud as he unearthed the contents of the crate. It had been carefully packed and was filled with sawdust to protect the contents—a bottle of French brandy, gently swaddled in burlap, a gift from Jules. The wooden lid of the crate lay on the floor, a small crowbar next to it, and he kicked both away as he carried the brandy to the desk. He sat in the armchair and leaned forward to unveil the bottle, admiring the rich color of the liquor as the sunlight streamed through it and the smoothly cut facets of the bottle itself. A small label was attached which simply stated “In vino veritas—J.” Jed reminded himself to wade through the crate for the manuscripts Jules was sure to have included, likely much less carefully wrapped, though arguably more precious. Jules was working on a treatise on neuro-anatomy, complete with an atlas, and had been sending portions of the work for Jed to review, critique and enjoy. They were a welcome respite from the dull brutality of gangrene and amputations, the constant vigilance against cholera and typhoid. Some of the drawings were quite frankly beautiful and Jed wondered if Jules had commissioned a professional artist to assist him.

They’d met in 1853 in Paris. They were both studying medicine at the Sorbonne and spending time in the wards of the hospitals. Jules was very patient with Jed’s rudimentary French and was quick to admire his skill in dissection and sheer determination to wrest every iota of knowledge from each clinical encounter. Jed was taken with Jules’s tenacity, nearly instinctive grasp of the brain, that Eleusinian Mystery of the body, and his entrée to both the high and low culture of Paris. They were young men then, unattached to anything but their ideals and their lusts. Jed had taken to wearing extravagantly flamboyant waistcoats and elaborate cravats he would have decried in Baltimore. Jules had grown his whiskers long, the color of a lion’s mane, and let his hair curl over his collar in the back. In the clinic, they were precise, attentive to any improper details or omission. In Paris, they were louche.

Even so, there were limits. Jules had tears come to his eyes with the strength of his laughter at Jed’s response to a demi-monde, her bronze curls carelessly tumbling into the décolletage she advertised insouciantly. She had said her name was Giselle and had attempted to drape herself over his lap like the omentum shielding the shimmering loops of jejunum and duodenum. He had become rigid, the echoes of every sermon from childhood filling is his ears, and she couldn’t find a purchase on his suddenly iron thighs. Jules had laughed and gasped and chuckled, “Oh, mon ami, tu es un vrai puritain, certainement!” Giselle, untroubled as a nymph, had dismounted and barely sparing Jed a glance, had moved onto more willing prey. In order to quiet Jules, Jed had had to drink a great quantity of liquor, using all the skill he’d gained in his jousts with Kentucky bourbon. There, at least, his American heritage was helpful. He could still recall feeling completely flustered, the awareness of Giselle’s rounded bottom pressed tightly to his groin, the smell of sandalwood mixed her sweat, her bare arms, clinging to his neck like lianas.

It seemed inconceivable that Paris went on, elegant and self-assured, sly and wise, while the War raged and America, in every way, rent herself apart. Jed thought back to wandering the arrondissements, the infinite serendipity of cafés and parks, the London plane trees graceful sentinels. He was used to the unprepossessing architecture of the States, the greater works set apart so the marble wouldn’t get splashed with mud; he felt again the skim of astonishment at Paris’s common-place transformation of stone into spire, the balance of inspiration and aspiration. And the art! Jed had, at first, resisted when Jules suggested they visit the Salon, considering it a waste of time. Jules had cajoled and Jed acquiesced, thinking to make the visit a brief one and then return to the real and important work of medicine. He felt like he was the first man to see the ocean-- that other world that engendered us, surrounds us, but whose depths we cannot plumb. Jules gabbled beside him for a time, then walked away. Jed felt his field of perception widening as he regarded the pictures; it was like the moment he first ran across a field as a young child, the sense of power and freedom, but with the full awareness of an adult and the full measure of the significance. These were experiences he had never been able to convey to Eliza; he had watched her doze off in his arms several times, tired but mostly bored, before he stopped trying to share the wonder of it with her. He was not sure if he should blame her—it was as if she were blind before the invention of Braille. His upbringing tried to tell him it was because she was a woman, weaker in body and mind; his experience told him otherwise. He had spent the most time before Rosa Bonheur’s “The Horse Fair,” seeing and looking and watching as the horses’ stasis turned dynamic, the complete evocation of the dust, the smell of the horse-shit in the street, the great stallion rearing and the trees and cloud subtle and observant, enveloping. He returned to regard the painting, sensing a message about power and control that eluded his total comprehension; the skill of the painting was such that he felt no frustration, only an endless yearning to know. He had frequented the smaller galleries after that initial visit to the Salon and had purchased two smaller paintings Eliza insisted he hang in his study, obscurely distressed by the lascivious curves of the still life, the following eyes of the stranger.

The bottle of brandy sat before him. He couldn’t imagine drinking it. Alcohol had never been a competent anesthetic for him and since the morphine had crawled along his nerves to his brain, only it had held him in thrall. The brandy was too fine to waste, to weak to numb; it was meant to be enjoyed with a companion, preferably in a night crowded with stars, tobacco smoke sweet in the air. There was no Jules here to join him and no equivalent. The color of the liquor put him in mind of Mary’s eyes when she was pleased. He could hardly imagine sharing a round-bellied snifter with her. He guessed that her abolitionism was joined with temperance and that it would take some great occasion, like the end of this endless War, to entice her into the barest bacchanalia. And yet, yet… she was like an Ingres, those lovely eyes and the perfect curve of her cheek to her jaw, her gaze penetrating but welcome. Perhaps he underestimated her potential to regard him with the perception of the Grand Odalisque, to render a moment infinitely charged, where a swallow of the amber brandy would bridge from one world to the next. He thought of her face as she tasted a sweet, shaped and colored like a Jonathan apple; she was already beyond Eve. He had been wrong about so many, many things that perhaps he could be wrong, one more time, to his benefit and delight.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought it would be a fun idea to think about what might have been sent to the ensemble gathered at Mansion House, as for the most part, they are far from home. The title is yet another gift from Emily Dickinson. I have included some information I found in the dilettante-y research I did for this piece, for your delectation. Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to share Mary’s marzipan ☺
> 
> Jules tells Jed "You are a true Puritan, surely!"
> 
> Sehnsucht (German pronunciation: [ˈzeːnzʊxt]) is a German noun translated as "longing", "pining", "yearning", or "craving",[1] or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state.
> 
> Heimweh is a German word roughly equivalent to homesickness.
> 
> In German, tatting is usually known by the Italian-derived word Occhi or as Schiffchenarbeit, which means "work of the little boat," referring to the boat-shaped shuttle; in Italian, tatting is called chiacchierino, which means "chatty.
> 
> Bluebonnet is a name given to any number of species of the genus Lupinus predominantly found in southwestern United States and is collectively the state flower of Texas. The shape of the petals on the flower resembles the bonnet worn by pioneer women to shield them from the sun.
> 
> The Mid-Nineteenth Century Clinical School of Paris  
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1987471/
> 
> The Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) were initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. They are the "most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece"
> 
> Jules Bernard Luys (17 August 1828 – 21 August 1897) was a French neurologist who made important contributions to the fields of neuroanatomy and neuropsychiatry. Born in Paris on 17 August 1828 he became a doctor of medicine in 1857 and conducted extensive research on the anatomy, pathology and functions of the central nervous system. In 1865 he published a treatise entitled Studies on the Structure, Functions and Diseases of the Cerebro-spinal System, this book was accompanied by a hand-drawn three-dimensional atlas of the brain.
> 
> Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French artist, an animalière (painter of animals) and sculptor, known for her artistic realism. Her most well-known paintings are Ploughing in the Nivernais,[1] first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux),[2] which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur is widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
> 
> Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.


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